The Middle Manager Advantage: Unlocking Your Organization's Strategic Core
“Culture lives and dies in the middle.”
According to a recent Harvard Business Review article, middle managers report the lowest levels of psychological safety compared to executives and frontline employees (Hagen & Zhao, 2025). It caught my attention because it names something we see constantly in our work at Groops: the middle is where culture either holds or cracks.
Psychological safety is simply the belief that you won't be punished, humiliated, or judged for speaking up, whether that's admitting a mistake, asking a question, or challenging the status quo. It's the differentiator between mediocrity and optimization. Research shows it's directly linked to the outcomes organizations need most: Edmondson's landmark study found that teams with high psychological safety demonstrate significantly greater learning behavior, innovation, and willingness to take interpersonal risks.
Radical idea: if the middle doesn't feel psychologically safe, no one does.
Caught in the Middle
Middle managers live in a tension few roles demand:
They're close enough to frontline teams to feel the pressure but too far from the top to shape direction
They're expected to coach with empathy and deliver with precision, often with little space to voice their own uncertainty
They absorb emotional stress from both sides without systemic support
The result? Silence. Strategic alignment breaks down. Learning stops. And those in the middle, the spinal cord of culture, begin to numb out.
Why Psychological Safety Matters for the Middle
For middle managers, psychological safety isn't optional, it's operational. When managers feel safe, they translate strategy honestly upward instead of filtering bad news, lead authentically downward instead of pretending to have all the answers, and become culture multipliers who model the openness and trust the organization needs.
The healthiest organizations protect both candor and accountability through clarity with care, vulnerability from senior leaders, and horizontal peer connections that let managers see they're not alone.
Research from Edmondson and Google's Project Aristotle show that psychological safety is the single strongest predictor of team performance. Yet it's often treated as a "soft skill" instead of a strategic imperative.
“Creating psychological safety that allows people to push themselves has been the game changer.”
What Happens When You Get It Wrong
Without psychological safety, senior leaders stop hearing the truth, teams sense that speaking up has consequences, and innovation slows as people play it safe. The "frozen middle" stays frozen.
When you invest in middle-manager safety, everything accelerates: communication strengthens, learning deepens, and engagement grows.
The Groops Take
At Groops, we see this pattern in nearly every scaling organization we work with. The best leaders ask:
What conditions would make our middle managers feel safe enough to lead boldly?
Do they have spaces to process upward pressure and downward accountability?
How do we model the kind of openness we ask them to create?
Something to Try: The Safety Check-In
A 10-minute exercise for your next manager meeting:
Leaders go first. Set the scene, explain why psychological safety matters and the purpose of the exercise. Model vulnerability by sharing something that’s been challenging for you or a mistake you’ve learned from, and acknowledge how valuable it is to have room to talk about it openly.
Start with reflection: Ask, "What's one thing you're holding back from saying upward?"
Listen without fixing: Allow space for candor, not correction. Ask, “What makes it easier or harder to share this?”
Name the pattern: Notice what themes emerge (ambiguity, pressure, role confusion)
Act on one insight: Show that speaking up leads to change
Small, visible actions build trust faster than slogans ever can.
Ready to Strengthen the Middle?
At Groops, we bring middle managers together in development cohorts designed specifically for the challenges of leading from the middle. Participants explore their leadership style and create a personal roadmap for growth. They build coaching skills to navigate pressure from above and below, and find genuine community with peers facing the same tensions.
Powered by psychology, expert facilitation, and AI-driven insights, our programs give middle managers what traditional training misses: self-awareness, practical skills, and the support to lead with confidence.
Because when the middle feels safe, skilled, and supported, the whole system moves.